Stephen Dwoskin

Reel 13 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

This distinctly personal journey into the artistic possibilities of independent film is not to be missed. Jonas Mekas, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Robert Kramer and many other visionaries and mavericks of the silver screen – as well as a book seller, a critic and a psychoanalyst – discuss what cinema has meant to them, what it is and what it could be and, implicitly, how it has changed over the 18 years in which this film was shot. Director Boris Lehman leads the charge, drawing in moments of absurdist humour and inventive camera work; he keeps things raw and spontaneous. His encounters with the now much-missed Jean Rouch and Stephen Dwoskin are particularly touching and stand testament to their personal playfulness and candour. An engaging, absorbing, epic odyssey of a movie.

Includes 'portraits' of Marianne Faithfull, Thelonious Monk and 28 others, some known, some less so.

The film is just this kind wandering through the personal ways and whys of different kinds of pain in different kinds of people. The film searches through the many levels of pain and finds it in its unique position between disaster and pleasure. Pain is..thus plunges us instantly into the midst of controversy and the unknown.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

No synopsis available yet.

In their lyrical and philosophical video essay, “Telescopic Intimacy”, Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin explore the works of avant-garde filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin. Aesthetically captivating and conceptually interesting, Dwoskin’s films focus on the nuances of the human face and the complexities of the visual gaze. Through unusual shots and enigmatic close-ups, Dwoskin creates a special form of “telescopic intimacy”, revolving around themes such as longing and desire, closeness and alienation, the subject and the ‘other’.

A portrait of a relationship between a physically disabled man and an able-bodied woman.

A personal film by experimental director Stephen Dwoskin.

'The Sun and the Moon, a film fairy tale, is about two women’s terrifying encounter with ‘Otherness’ in the form of a man, abject and monstrous, and for them to either to witness, accept or partake in his annihilation. All are caught in their own isolation and are fearful of the menace that has to be met. The film, as a personal interpretation of Beauty and the Beast, enciphers concerns, beliefs and desires in seductive images that are themselves a form of camouflage, making it possible to utter harsh truths.'

Stephen Dwoskin was born in New York in 1939 and began making independent shorts there in 1961. In 1964 he followed his research work to London where he settled and participated in the founding of the London Filmmaker’s Co-op. His experimental films, for which he himself does the camera work, play with ideas of desire, sexual and mental solitude and the passage of time. In his films he also explores representation in cinema, performances, personal impressions and his own physical handicap which has been a source of inspiration for him throughout his career. His sensitive and emancipating works have been the subject of various international presentations.

Born in 1904, Brandt was a shy and enigmatic man who dominated British photography for decades. His early studies of class-divided Britain were followed by the postwar series of "distorted nudes", shot on beaches and inside rooms. The film is a fitting final portrait of Brandt (it was completed in the year he died), and recomposes his work in cinematic terms. The camera moves through an apartment where the pictures were taken, to reveal photographs scattered 'in situ'. These are panned to show the surrounding space, the angle of vision and a model who reconstructs Brandt's original image. Dwoskin emphasises visual atmosphere through the language of the eye.

A exploration of the origin, theory, philosophy and themes of Stephen Dwoskin's films from 1963 to 1984.

Shot in Brixton, London, in 2004, the film is originally a letter addressed to Dwoskin by its authors. It creates a unique space, movement and rhythm in which they develop his point of view on the evolution of cinema in the western world.

Avant-garde appeal on behalf of and made by the adventurous leftist London cinema, The Other Cinema, using the facilities provided by the BBC community programme unit.

"Hi Steve" and "Dear Robert" exchanged between two filmmakers: Robert Kramer and Stephen Dwoskin. "The Videoletters strip away the formalities that had littered our work and thinking. Through the making of the 'video letters' we started to relearn and re-look.". The Videoletters provide the benefits of reflection -- a lubricant for thought made out of very basic stuff -- the reduction of complexity -- and they cemented a brotherhood. Sadly, Robert's untimely death prevented the continuation of the "video letters" and they remain unfinished and unedited. (S.D.)

Stephen Dwoskin’s final film is a meditation on the subjective experience and cultural concepts of ageing. The film is an ode to the texture, the beauty, the singularity of aging faces and silhouettes, a hypnotic poem in the Dwoskin meaning of the term which is long observations of very tiny details. A gesture, a pause, a look, a moment. Throughout his films intimacy has always played a leading role and this is also true for Age is..., all the faces being close friends, or close friends relatives and sometimes even Stephen himself.

Stephen Dwoskin’s final film is a meditation on the subjective experience and cultural concepts of ageing. The film is an ode to the texture, the beauty, the singularity of aging faces and silhouettes, a hypnotic poem in the Dwoskin meaning of the term which is long observations of very tiny details. A gesture, a pause, a look, a moment. Throughout his films intimacy has always played a leading role and this is also true for Age is..., all the faces being close friends, or close friends relatives and sometimes even Stephen himself.

'The Silent Cry is a fictionalised narrative film, based on documentary facts and extracts of one English girl's memories and thoughts, all surrounded, and directed towards her particular dilemma. This dilemma can be summarized as her basic inability to have relationships, especially sustained relationships, and particularly with men. This is the total of her statement and the film. The construction and flow of the film follows the way she thinks - it is her point of view that is followed in the film. So all things are the way she remembers and dwells on them, and which are important to her.' - S.D.

'Dyn Amo' is a 'drama' exploring the distinction between a person's self and his projection of that self to others; and it's a 'horror movie' tragically suggesting how a projection can become more substantial than the self behind it. Its subjects are role-playing (especially sexual role-playing), and the masochism of playing a role that conforms to others' exploitative interests.

'Dyn Amo' is a 'drama' exploring the distinction between a person's self and his projection of that self to others; and it's a 'horror movie' tragically suggesting how a projection can become more substantial than the self behind it. Its subjects are role-playing (especially sexual role-playing), and the masochism of playing a role that conforms to others' exploitative interests.

The film is just this kind wandering through the personal ways and whys of different kinds of pain in different kinds of people. The film searches through the many levels of pain and finds it in its unique position between disaster and pleasure. Pain is..thus plunges us instantly into the midst of controversy and the unknown.

The film is just this kind wandering through the personal ways and whys of different kinds of pain in different kinds of people. The film searches through the many levels of pain and finds it in its unique position between disaster and pleasure. Pain is..thus plunges us instantly into the midst of controversy and the unknown.

Stephen Dwoskin brings together members of the Ballet Negres dance company, founded in London in 1946.

Stephen Dwoskin brings together members of the Ballet Negres dance company, founded in London in 1946.

Stephen Dwoskin brings together members of the Ballet Negres dance company, founded in London in 1946.

"Either in its natural state or with its embellishments of makeup, jewels, and hairdos, nothing can restrain the imagination from the most forms of speculation. All the senses are concentrated in this one head: eyes, ears, nose, lips, tongue and the skin which covers all with its network of vibrating nerves. One imagines the senses, the counterpart of our own, ready to respond with all the various moods, suggestions and agreements. Through the eyes alone, when placed in contact with our own, a visual dialogue and interplay is embarked upon. And when the lips, two bodies fitting together in perfect harmony, break into a smile, they invite further exploration. Then, with the engagement of time, this dialogue shifts from speculation to realization. The face transforms from its abstract suggestiveness to the singular projection of seduction. It is no longer anyones face; it is the face of one particular person" (Stephen Dwoskin)

To Tea, made in Holland (at the house of the Dutch avant-garde filmmaker Franz Zwartjes), is a slowed ‘Alice in Roomland’.A guide to sensual contact between two women. Their contact is arrived at through an arrangement of slow tactics. As the light of day goes the bodies come closer, and the piano melody floats in a distant hall. Once my Hungarian art teacher said: “If you exaggerate the objective lines you reach a stronger subjective expression.” So here the strange tea party gives over to touch. – S.D.

An unfulfilled man renders himself to the unrealized sensuality of four women. In his drifting search, he fails and fades in the same loneliness as the women.

An unfulfilled man renders himself to the unrealized sensuality of four women. In his drifting search, he fails and fades in the same loneliness as the women.

A group of strangers explore their fantasies over a period of five days.

A static camera records, in one single continuous shot, a woman's face before, during and after orgasm. The act of looking and the limits of the film frame are highlighted in this intimate sexual episode with Tina Fraser. Artist Stephen Dwoskin presents a powerful, personal moment while maintaining a distance and resisting the viewer being subsumed into the action on screen.

A man walks towards the camera down the end of a street to the sound of 'Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet', a composition by Gavin Bryars based on a loop of an anonymous homeless man singing the song. The man’s voice is progressively intensified by an instrumental accompaniment, which increases in density and richness, before the whole thing gradually fades out. Dwoskin’s film was produced to be shown during the premiere of Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London in December 1972. For Dwoskin, it represents “… the singing voice of the last days of a London drunk (anonymous) as the orchestra raises him to heaven. The faint ghost image of a figure swims gradually to you through the grains of film low light…”

Filmed in New York in 1964, completed in London 1967.

Trixi is Dwoskin’s most convulsive version of his recurrent theme: the confrontation of a solitary girl with the camera. Shot in one continuous 8-hour session. Trixi records Beatrice Cordua’s responses to the situation, from initial shyness, fear and withdrawal through teasing and posturing to naked surrender and final exhaustion …. The camera is highly mobile; often confronting the girl in extreme close-ups, sometimes swooping down from overhead, sometimes searching to “recapture” her …. The camera itself is the object of erotic desire, [in] the sense of giving a performance shifting imperceptibly in a helpless self-exposure in response to its constant stare. Clearly, the form of the film was dictated by the response of the performer. Beatrice Cordua proves Dwoskin’s most expressive subject to date, and the film is correspondingly “open,” the camera having been willing to choose its tactics as direct responses.

The film questions the possible viewing positions with the girl; in other words, who and what is looking at whom? and is the girl alone or with another – or is the camera position that of voyeur or protagonist? The only way to figure it out is to spend some time with her! – S.D.

Lost dreams is made out of those little remnants of images, from a single glance to a detailed moment, of those women from youth’s love and young dreams. They are woven together, like fragments of the mind, from the ends of the film to the corners of the frame.

No synopsis available yet.

A naked girl is filmed passing through a gallery of paintings, reminding us of the difference between the plasticity of painting and a body moving in an open space.